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in the United States to new heights with its racial pride and revolutionary politics. In the
early 1990s, Aaron Michaels formed the New Black Panther Party, which Khalid
Muhammad and Malik Zulu Shabazz expanded in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Similar to the original Black Panther Party created in 1966, the New Black Panther Party
promoted Black Nationalism and Black self-defense. Muhammad’s activism was
considered so radical by opponents of his Black resistance ideology that in 1993, the
United States Congress voted to censure him. Congress’ contempt for Muhammad did
not stop him and fellow Black revolutionaries from continuing the Black radical tradition
of unapologetic attempts to secure complete Black liberation. 14
In the 1980s, the Afrocentric and African cultural nationalist scholars who were
active during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements such as
Molefi Kete Asante, Frances Cress Welsing, Marimba Ani, and Maulana Karenga gained
momentum. They were on television shows like Tony Brown’s Journal and Phil Donahue
spreading their philosophical ideas for an intellectual and cultural Black revolution. 15
However, similar to the YouTube resisters of study, during the 1960s and 1970s,
theoretical divisions existed between Black radical political nationalists and cultural
nationalists on which direction was best for defeating African American oppression. In
1969, the Black Panthers and the US Organization led by Karenga, epitomized the rift
when a shootout erupted between the two groups at UCLA. Though the F.B.I.’s
subversive and questionable COINTELPRO program was largely to blame for the
tensions, the Black Panthers’ Marxist political and economic inclinations and the US
Organization’s focus on the re-acclimation of African Americans with African culture
reflected the two groups’ divergent positions. Both were Black Nationalists who were
determined to liberate Blacks from an oppressive system of racial control, but with
different approaches and values.
14
Christian Adams, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice
Department (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011), 112-116.
15
Duron Chavis, “Dr. Frances Cress Welsing on Donahue,” YouTube, 45:01, February
11, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iquXlgRGX7I; Tony Brown, “Tony
Brown’s Journal—Dr. Maulana Karenga,” YouTube, 1:05, December 29, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U60WmAH3jIc.